This invention relates generally to clinical databases and more particularly to methods and apparatus for collecting and storing large amounts of clinical data.
Clinical database repositories (CDRs) are databases that are usually used by a plurality of different hospitals or organizations to store and analyze patient data. These repositories can be used to store a great deal of data concerning patients. For example, a patient may be on an electrocardiograph machine for six hours to discover one or more heart palpitations. At least one known method for storing such information on a CDR involves storing the entire electrocardiogram, in full form, in the CDR. Such an electrocardiogram requires a considerable amount of storage space in the CDR, yet this volume of data from individual patients is not unusual. Even though there is an ever-increasing amount of data that needs to be stored, and the amount of information that is purged is typically very small. As a result, CDRs are rapidly becoming unmanageably large. Many CDR databases already measure in the Terabytes, and continue to grow by the day.